One of the more depressing outcomes of the currently renewed enthusiasm for not thinking about things, and trawling through internet sized volumes of data seeking correlations to explain phenomena is that you are bound to turn up something.
Here's an example of the kind of thing we're going to see a whole lot more of. A correlation coefficient of .95? Must be significant.
http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=598
As one of the poor minority of actual computational physicists that have been co-opted into the new world of 'big data', I'm yet to see any genuine insight from these 'data mining' exercises, and suspect that pure laziness and lack of discipline are behind the apparent unwillingness to 1. read, and 2. learn the difficult mathematics others have already solved.
Not that it necessarliy applies to jellyfish, but an attempt to quantify the increased solar flux (if there is any), and somehow link that to the increased quantity of jellyfish food and lack of predators - pretty much the only important variables in population growth - would be the beginnings of the glimmer of an actual hypothesis...
rant mode off...
